“…and the fact that we have to pay people to take these recyclables away," says Weeks. "That’s a big key right there. There’s really not much of an economic market for these types of things.”

Weeks says recycling should be done on a voluntary basis and opposes it being mandated in Wichita as it is in some Kansas cities.

“I am concerned that at some time in the future, the city is going to say OK people are used to voluntary recycling, let’s just flip the switch and make it mandatory recycling,” says Weeks.

Weeks says the idea of running out of landfill space is ironic because Kansas has so much land throughout the Midwest that some farmers are paid to not grow crops on, citing a study by A. Clark Wiseman, an economics professor at Gonzaga University.

“He calculated that all the waste that America would generate over the next thousand years would take a landfill 100 yards high and 35 miles square on each side. That is just about the dimensions of a county like Sedgwick County in Kansas," he says. "And I’m confident that in the next thousand years that we will probably come up with some magic technology that just vaporizes trash and we don’t have to worry about that.”

Weeks says when there’s an opportunity for people to make money recycling, such as automobiles, cardboard and gold, people should recycle.

“But when you have to persuade them to do something, then you have to look at the motivations of why these people want this to be done. Are the motivations real? Is there some sort of hidden agenda or do they just have the accurate facts at their command?”